'Nothing stops a bullet like a job'

Already this year, 100 Los Angeles gang members have died in the turf wars that make homicide the most common cause of death for the city's teenagers. But a Jesuit priest called G-Dog and his unusual bakery may hold the secret to breaking the cycle of violence

'Nothing stops a bullet like a job'

Already this year, 100 Los Angeles gang members have died in the turf wars that make homicide the most common cause of death for the city's teenagers. But a Jesuit priest called G-Dog and his unusual bakery may hold the secret to breaking the cycle of violence

Tuesday 23 November 1999 19.58 EST
First published on Tuesday 23 November 1999 19.58 EST

Father Greg Boyle has one of his regular pastoral duties to attend to tonight. He is burying 19-year-old Arnando Bogarin, shot dead the previous week in mysterious circumstances after he had been arrested by police. It will be the 79th such ceremony carried out by the Jesuit priest from the Dolores Mission Church, known to the gang members of east Los Angeles as G-Dog.

That very night, the police helicopters are hovering over Broadway Avenue in Venice at 3am, lighting up the streets around and bringing residents on to the sidewalk. Officers have received an anonymous call from a payphone to let them know that Aaron Schoolfield, a member of the Shoreline Crips gang known locally as Cheeseman, has been shot dead. "We don't know whether it was a drive-by or a walk-up," says a police spokesman in the morning. What we do know is that last week, Schoolfield, at the age of 28, became gang victim No 100 in LA this year.

In the 1988 film Colors, about gangs in LA, directed by one of Venice's residents, Dennis Hopper, the singer Ice T proclaims on the soundtrack: "The gangs of LA will never die/Just multiply." Sometimes, as Father Greg makes a quiet and personal address to the weeping youngsters in a Boyle Heights church, or as the police's anti-gang Crash squad (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) embarks on yet another investigation, it must seem that the prediction was all too accurate.

The current police log, updated monthly, shows that there are 61,406 members in LA's 409 gangs; the most common form of death for teenagers in the city is homicide. As their websites advise on the efficacy of the latest semi-automatic, the gangs seem to be endlessly multiplying while dividing the city into the haves and the have-nots, the home-owners and the homies, the fearful souls in their gated communities and the solemn young men outside them.

But is this slide towards a gangland armageddon inevitable? Some remarkable developments in LA over recent months indicate that for gang members the way out is not necessarily in a coffin or doing 25 to life.

Just down the street from where the music of Pepe Aguilar is blasting out of Casa del Musico, and across the road from where La Pacita is offering its speciality of cocteles de camaron , is the little office from which G-Dog and his crew operate. One young man is waiting for Father Greg to write a note so that he can visit a surgery - the note is to reassure the doctor that the consultation fee will be paid. Another needs a cab fare for a job interview. "I'm the priest who has been mistaken for an ATM machine," says Father Greg laconically as he hands over a $10 bill.

During the day, there will young shaven-headed parole violators asking if the priest will accompany them as they turn themselves in to the police, young men in the strange gang uniform of white knee-length socks and maxi-baggy shorts inquiring about the funeral arrangements, others shyly seeking work. And work - jobs, wages, respect, stability - is what underpins this extraordinary little oasis in the streets described as having the largest gang concentration in the US.

"It's the urban poor's version of teenage suicide," says Father Greg of gang membership. "Life is miserable already. It's not so much a question of what pulls them into the gangs as what pushes them out of the house. These kids are my heroes. They show great courage in facing the obstacles in front of them. There was a time when you could conjure up a future, get out and look back on your gang days, but crack changed all that."

Father Greg's crowded office is the home of Jobs for a Future, the attempt by him and his team to address the lack of prospects for young men with records as long as their tattooed arms. The project has set up its own bakery with a staff of 70, and its own clothes and artefacts outlet - Homeboy Industries - which sells T-shirts and the like. It is also operating its own employment network, finding work for around 300 unemployables a year. A painting on the wall says "Gracias big G-Dog, from the Li'l Homies." "Nothing stops a bullet like a job" is the slogan on some of the T-shirts, and it is this message that Father Greg has been trying to hammer home to the city fathers and mothers.

He has been quietly banging away at this theme for some years now, but at the end of last month something happened which indicated that finally the message is getting through. The bakery, which has given so many of the young men their first-ever job, burned down in a wiring accident. The sight of a weeping young man about to start work for the first time confronted with the charred remains has stirred the conscience of many of the softer-hearted inhabitants of what can be a very sentimental city.

"One of the bakers said, 'We all knew that this was the solution and this works, but it took a fire to convince people outside the community'," says Father Greg, himself an Angeleno. "I think he was right. The bakery was so much more than a job; it was the family that some of these kids had never had. It was their reason to get up in the morning and not to gang-bang the night before." (Gang-banging, in LA parlance, means general gang activities and does not carry the sexual connotation it does in Britain.)

Father Greg has had his problems with the police: "They don't like me. It's the old Middle Eastern thing of 'the friend of my enemy is my enemy'. The police just don't know this community." A few years ago, when Father Greg had written some articles about the situation for the LA Times, Captain Bob Medina of the LAPD said to the paper: "I don't think we're getting the type of cooperation we should be getting. He wants to pamper these people and take them by the hand. The way these people have been brought up, that would make it easier for them to go and break the law. These people understand only one thing and that's force."

Over in Venice, it is not a Catholic priest but a Nation of Islam activist who has been trying to get the young men of the Shoreline Crips off the streets, away from crack and into jobs. (The name Crips supposedly came from the "crippled" style of walking affected by early gang members, although a more heroic version is that it originally stood for Continuous Revolution in Progress.)

The Black Muslims became involved earlier this summer after the introduction of an injunction against 38 named gang members in the area, setting a 10pm-till-dawn curfew and banning them from gathering on the streets. Both the Nation of Islam and the American Civil Liberties Union fought the injunction, claiming that it had a racial effect, in that the members of the gang were predominantly black. Their court challenge has been unsuccessful, but Stan Muhammad of the Nation of Islam is hopeful that a programme called Venice 2000, based on their self-improvement philosophy, will have the effect that injunctions would not. "It will erase the drug activity, it will erase the gang activity," he says.

In the south central area of LA, a former gang leader, Nino Cappuccino, has been working with young musicians and artists to get the message across that there are other excitements in life than the possibility of death. At the headquarters of Watts Labor Community Action Committee, a group formed in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, a play about gangs, by Lynn Manning, will have its first performance.

"Most gang members have no remorse for their crimes," says Cappuccino, talking over the loud rap music rehearsal for the show. "Some of them feel repentance, some of them don't. The play is about two gang members who find repentance within themselves for the sin they just committed in killing all those innocent kids."

Remorse. Repentance. Redemption. How much hope is there in those words? It is more than 50 years since the first gangs were formed in LA. In City of Quartz, Mike Davis describes those pioneers in south central as "the architects of social space in new and usually hostile settings... gangs offered 'cool worlds' or urban socialisation for poor young newcomers from rural Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi." Since then, the poor young newcomers have come from further afield - El Salvador, Mexico City, Vietnam. The names may have been exotic - the Gladiators, the Businessmen, the Slick 50s - but the end result has been more mundane: jail and death.

The city has been trying its own intervention programme, LA Bridges, in which $11m (£7m) of city money has been pushed into 26 different neighbourhoods where there is a gang problem. The programme pays for advice, counselling and educational tutoring and provides somewhere for gang members to go when they are not studying or working. But there are doubts as to the effectiveness of the scheme and an audit will now be carried out to see whether this is just millions of dollars being poured away. Of the area's major politicians, only Tom Hayden, a veteran radical and state senator is credited with having a real rapport with the gangs and a real commitment to tackling the problem.

And where have the police been in all this? Some have taken Captain Medina's advice on fighting fire with fire a bit too literally. On the same day as the funeral in east LA and the murder in Venice, another gang member, Ruben Rojas, is told that his crack cocaine conviction has been quashed. Rojas, a senior member of the Temple Street gang, is one of dozens to have been busted by a former member of the Crash squad, one Rafael Perez.

When Perez himself was earlier arrested for stealing cocaine from a police evidence room and selling it on, he was offered a deal: a five-year sentence if he gave information about the illegal activities of himself and his Crash squad colleagues. What has emerged from his testimony is that some of his fellow officers felt that any means necessary could be employed against gang members, including shooting them after they were handcuffed and disarmed. It is this cynical style of crime-fighting that has prompted the biggest corruption probe into the LAPD since the 30s and prompted soul-searching as to whether there are better ways to tackle gang deaths.

So does this strange confluence of a fire in east LA, a death in Venice, a rap musical in south central and a Crash confession mean that there will be peace in the valleys?

This is a city where $3,000 (£1,800) reward signs for lost puppies are posted on street corners; where houses sell for the sort of money that would employ 200 "li'l homies" for a year. A local journalist has described its citizens as "taxophobics" but surely it can afford to follow the logic of Father Greg, Stan Muhammad and Nino Cappuccino, and see that jobs, which may cost money, stop bullets more effectively than corrupt officers who use too much of their own ammunition. There is much millennial talk on the west coast, but perhaps 2000 will signal the beginning of the end of the wars.

"I have already seen sea changes," says Father Greg. "People have started to see that 'smart on crime' rather than 'tough on crime' makes sense. People have to see that there is a high degree of complexity about belonging to a gang. It's a symptom, not a problem. They have to see these kids as human beings."